(Verse 5) — And is it not for your very great wickedness, and your infinite iniquities? 4. From idle words one comes to insulting ones. — Behold, from a sluggish heart he came to idle words, and from idle words, through the crime of falsehood, he blazed forth into insults. For these are the stages of growing guilt, that the tongue, when it is not restrained, by no means lies still where it has fallen, but always descends to worse. But those things which are subjoined, because they are very plain according to the history, are not to be expounded literally. 5.
But since we have said that the friends of blessed Job hold the likeness of heretics (above, in the preface, and very often elsewhere), while he himself bears the signification of the holy Church, let us now show how the words of Eliphaz suit the falsehood of heretics. For there follows: